ejronin
04-15-2007, 02:15 PM
As someone who frequently plays Action / Adventure / RPG titles there are things that have become a "must" in these kinds of games. particularly when the retail version of the product has as many problems as Silverfall.
LOADING SCREEN
Off the bat, I noticed that the initial load time is extremely long (about 4 minutes), so I'd suggest a loading bar of some kind so that we don't sit and have to stare at a buxom elf wondering if our system froze up.
AUTOSAVE
The game intermittently crashes with random errors (for me) when jumping between zones. Normally this only happens when I've been playing for "X" amount of time so I'm sure it's very isolated or that there is a memory leak. In any event, to ensure that people who play this game don't lose a couple of hours of progress there should be an autosave feature that saves the characters progress between zoning. This would be best implemented by asking the player if they wish to zone, and then automatically saving the game, and THEN zoning. This way if the game crashes, the progress isn't lost and the player can try again, as well as help the developer isolate the specific issue if it is in fact a common problem.
VOICE OVERS
Not every NPC talks. This is fine and probably a good thing considering the size of audio files and paying voice actors / actresses. However, there are a few NPC who do nothing other than make guttural noises but their text is plain English. There are other NPC's who talk with a slight variation to what is in the text. There needs to be consistency within this area. Either all of hte NPC talk to match whats on the screen, or they all make a "sims" kind of guttural noise that merely indicates a mood rather than specific ideas and contexts.
TEXT EDITING
There are some serious misspellings and invalid contractions in the text displayed on the screen. This may be due to my screen resolution of 1680 X 1050. I'm not sure, but every now and then, with the same NPCs, I see words strung together, missing letters and various other grammatical errors. I can understand gramatical errors in terms of vernacular. It's fine to do if you are portraying a kind of ethnicity or geographical location. In the southern US, people say "ya'll" which is "you all". If an NPC say "ya'll come back" to illustrate their geographic location then these things are fine, but the below examples are what I'm specifically getting at
"I'm notsure that I have time to do all of that."
"don't bother me with such trivial tasks."
"There are alot of refugees that got lost."
This looks extremely amature and unpolished. Something that is greatly disappointing to me. "notsure" is two words, the "d" in "don't" should be a capital "D", and the "alot" used in it's present context technically means "to give a prescribed or predetermined amount of 'X' to or for a subject" (even then, it would be "allot" with an extra "l"), when the implied meaning was supposed to "a lot" - two words denoting "many".
KEYMAPPING
It's not so much as the keys are mapped in an irregular fashion as it is the mouse wheel zoom is backwards and there is no way to select between dropped items that a character is standing on. The area in which the game detects the mouse pointer hovering over an item or character is too large. This makes it taxing to pick up items in the same general vicinity of an NPC, companion, or target. Perhaps adding a function that allows to delineate between the three would serve to make the game a bit more enjoyable. I'd suggest mapping a key such as CTRL to highlight dropped items on the screen and at the same time while the CTRL key is depressed making only the dropped items selectable will eliminate having to move your party away from the item and going back to get them with the party out of the way.
Given that this game has nothing in the way of totally new concepts and borrows heavily from past hack / slash RPGs (like Dungeon Seige, Diablo, Titan Quest, and Fable) I'm amazed that these things were not addressed earlier. I'm unsure if the testing was rushed or the development was rushed, but it is apparent that something was rushed. I'm also under the impression that the game was tested on either one system configuration or the developers machines only. I understand budgets can be a beat to deal with and coupled with timelines things can be missed, but there are just too many initial issues to be written off as "oh well, it'll be fixed"
It is these kinds of mishaps and problems that turn a game that has great potential into something that ends up in the "bargain bin". Should a sequel to this game come out, the word of mouth issues that surround Silverfall could damage any next installment of the game.
I would thank Monte Cristo for developing and Atari for publishing, but I would scold them both for having some of the worst follow up and support I've seen since... Warcraft III (which was actually pretty understandable since Blizzard was being sold or had just been sold). I sincerely hope that in the coming weeks the support for this title will increase and issues that I as well as others have mentioned will find swift resolution. Failure to do so would drastically hurt sales and the possibility of a popular sequel (as well as having a community that is willing to develop home brew mods via the map editor).
LOADING SCREEN
Off the bat, I noticed that the initial load time is extremely long (about 4 minutes), so I'd suggest a loading bar of some kind so that we don't sit and have to stare at a buxom elf wondering if our system froze up.
AUTOSAVE
The game intermittently crashes with random errors (for me) when jumping between zones. Normally this only happens when I've been playing for "X" amount of time so I'm sure it's very isolated or that there is a memory leak. In any event, to ensure that people who play this game don't lose a couple of hours of progress there should be an autosave feature that saves the characters progress between zoning. This would be best implemented by asking the player if they wish to zone, and then automatically saving the game, and THEN zoning. This way if the game crashes, the progress isn't lost and the player can try again, as well as help the developer isolate the specific issue if it is in fact a common problem.
VOICE OVERS
Not every NPC talks. This is fine and probably a good thing considering the size of audio files and paying voice actors / actresses. However, there are a few NPC who do nothing other than make guttural noises but their text is plain English. There are other NPC's who talk with a slight variation to what is in the text. There needs to be consistency within this area. Either all of hte NPC talk to match whats on the screen, or they all make a "sims" kind of guttural noise that merely indicates a mood rather than specific ideas and contexts.
TEXT EDITING
There are some serious misspellings and invalid contractions in the text displayed on the screen. This may be due to my screen resolution of 1680 X 1050. I'm not sure, but every now and then, with the same NPCs, I see words strung together, missing letters and various other grammatical errors. I can understand gramatical errors in terms of vernacular. It's fine to do if you are portraying a kind of ethnicity or geographical location. In the southern US, people say "ya'll" which is "you all". If an NPC say "ya'll come back" to illustrate their geographic location then these things are fine, but the below examples are what I'm specifically getting at
"I'm notsure that I have time to do all of that."
"don't bother me with such trivial tasks."
"There are alot of refugees that got lost."
This looks extremely amature and unpolished. Something that is greatly disappointing to me. "notsure" is two words, the "d" in "don't" should be a capital "D", and the "alot" used in it's present context technically means "to give a prescribed or predetermined amount of 'X' to or for a subject" (even then, it would be "allot" with an extra "l"), when the implied meaning was supposed to "a lot" - two words denoting "many".
KEYMAPPING
It's not so much as the keys are mapped in an irregular fashion as it is the mouse wheel zoom is backwards and there is no way to select between dropped items that a character is standing on. The area in which the game detects the mouse pointer hovering over an item or character is too large. This makes it taxing to pick up items in the same general vicinity of an NPC, companion, or target. Perhaps adding a function that allows to delineate between the three would serve to make the game a bit more enjoyable. I'd suggest mapping a key such as CTRL to highlight dropped items on the screen and at the same time while the CTRL key is depressed making only the dropped items selectable will eliminate having to move your party away from the item and going back to get them with the party out of the way.
Given that this game has nothing in the way of totally new concepts and borrows heavily from past hack / slash RPGs (like Dungeon Seige, Diablo, Titan Quest, and Fable) I'm amazed that these things were not addressed earlier. I'm unsure if the testing was rushed or the development was rushed, but it is apparent that something was rushed. I'm also under the impression that the game was tested on either one system configuration or the developers machines only. I understand budgets can be a beat to deal with and coupled with timelines things can be missed, but there are just too many initial issues to be written off as "oh well, it'll be fixed"
It is these kinds of mishaps and problems that turn a game that has great potential into something that ends up in the "bargain bin". Should a sequel to this game come out, the word of mouth issues that surround Silverfall could damage any next installment of the game.
I would thank Monte Cristo for developing and Atari for publishing, but I would scold them both for having some of the worst follow up and support I've seen since... Warcraft III (which was actually pretty understandable since Blizzard was being sold or had just been sold). I sincerely hope that in the coming weeks the support for this title will increase and issues that I as well as others have mentioned will find swift resolution. Failure to do so would drastically hurt sales and the possibility of a popular sequel (as well as having a community that is willing to develop home brew mods via the map editor).